I'm not even sure it was useful back then. So many answers to threads were just non-answers like "you can't do that" or "there is no fix."
It was easy to find people with the exact same problem as me, but getting the problem solved was often hopeless.
In some ways, community forums for such a highly obfuscated operating system are somewhat useless, because the answer is always "hopefully Apple notices this and fixes it."
> It was easy to find people with the exact same problem as me, but getting the problem solved was often hopeles
That was true for me, back when my 14-month-old iMac (I was relying on to make music) developed color streaks on both sides of the display. The forum told me I was one of hundreds of victims ... before that topic was erased. A 'fix' took a couple of years to be offered.
That's still useful.. 'No-one has managed to fix this' is good to know, even if it's not the answer one might want to find.
You’re forgetting the mid-2000s classic:
“why would you want to do that?”
Even „there is no fix“ is a helpful answer because it means I can stop searching the apple forum and instead turn to figuring out another solution.